Archive for Social Media – Page 2

Recently during and after the many church meetings and events I’ve been to one of my favourite things to do is watch all my current Facebook friends becoming friends with large groups of others all at once. These others of course are also present at the meeting or event. We all do it. You meet a new person or a bunch of new people at a fun event, they seem cool, and you all start adding each other on Facebook. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when you start thinking about avoiding Facebook because it takes too much time, or you feel like there are too many people you don’t really care about and you can’t find anything useful so you start to think it’s not worth your time.

Some people solve this problem by ‘un-friending’ people they don’t care as much about. To me, this negates one of the main benefits of Facebook, the ability to keep tabs on acquaintances. While there are some people I meet at meetings or large church events that become good friends, the majority are very nice people that I will not stay in constant communication with. I will however likely see them again at a similar event.

Facebook is a great tool for maintaining some basic knowledge about what’s going on in people’s lives, or checking out what might be going on before you see them again. This lets you more easily pick up the relationship where you left off and shows people that you both remember them and care about their lives.

If you’re thinking this sounds great, but it still sounds like a lot of work, you’re in luck. It is great, but it’s also easy. Facebook has this great feature called “lists” that lets you organize your Facebook friends into different groups so you can give your different Facebook friends different amounts of attention as necessary, just like you do friends in other parts of your life. You can also browse your lists so that you can see what’s going on in ‘what’s her name again’s’ life as long as you remember what list she’s in.

Here’s how you create a custom Facebook list:

– From your Facebook Home page click the more button next to the Friends option in the right-hand column
– You are then given a page with all your current lists. From here you can add people or pages to lists and create new lists using the Create List button at the top

To add Facebook friends to a Facebook list:

– Go to a friend’s timeline
– Click the button that says ‘friends’

Add your Facebook friends to a list to make following them more convenient.

– pick the list you would like to add them too

That’s it. Some pretty simple steps and you’re online life has become so much simpler and easier to manage. If you’d like to learn more about Facebook lists, here are Facebook’s Make a List instructions with more details on what you can do with Facebook Lists.

An example of how to use Facebook lists beyond filtering what you read when, includes posting status updates that are only visible to certain groups of people.

While it can take a bit of time to get your lists set up and organized, it’s easy to get started by putting a few close friends on a list, and adding more as you have time. Trust me, once you start using Facebook lists you’ll be amazed at how much more manageable Facebook is and wonder how you kept up before.

What are some other ways to make using Facebook more enjoyable? How do you use Facebook lists in your life?

While social media may be the it thing, church social media use generally leaves something to be desired. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but I imagine it has something to do with generally overworked staff & clergy and reliance on over committed volunteers. There are some churches and church organizations that use social media quite well. These are usually churches that have staff with social media somewhere in their job description or who take it to be there. But for many churches good or even decent social media use remains a challenge. There are some easy things you can do however to start making effective use of social media.

The first thing to do is to find a service you like for scheduling posts. There are more and more of these becoming available all the time. Some of the more popular ones are TweetDeck, HootSuite* & Buffer. Personally I use both HootSuite and Buffer to manage my social media networks. Being able to schedule updates is invaluable in your effort to stay relevant with social media and stay sane.

Once you’ve selected your scheduling service, you can start entering upcoming events and notices to be posted to the various social networks your church uses. This lets you sit down once a week and schedule out your updates and have them posted at the appropriate times. You can also use this to schedule news about updates you’ve made to your website, like new sermons or blog postings.

Another easy thing you can do to improve your church social media use is re-post other relevant content whether that’s sharing or liking on Facebook or re-tweeting on twitter or similar actions on other social networks. This lets you share good content with your followers and stay on their radar without too much effort on your part. Combine re-posting with pre-scheduling and your church social media accounts should be pretty active.

There are many people who think the above is not good enough and some who think if you only use social media like advertising, you’re missing the point and shouldn’t be using it all. While I understand where these people are coming from and there are more and better ways to use social media, in my opinion, this is a good way to get started using social media in a manageable way. Just remember to stay open to conversations, and ask the occasional question as well. That’s when church social media starts to be more fun.

What do you think? Is having pre-scheduled event notices and re-posts enough to make social media worthwhile? What are other easy ways to keep your network active?

* These links contain affiliate links for which I get a small commission if you by their product.